The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary - and frequently contrarian - principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as "The Oracle of Omaha."

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

For 25 years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession - until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital.

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In little more than half a decade, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects, even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this "chaos monkey" to test online services' robustness - their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society's chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder).

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

The Alpha Masters brings the secretive world of hedge funds into the light of day for the first time. As the authority that the biggest names in the business go to before breaking major news, Ahuja has access to the innermost workings of the hedge fund industry. For the first time, in Alpha Masters, Ahuja provides both institutional and savvy private investors with tangible, analytical insight into the psychology of the trade, the strategies and investment criteria serious money managers use to determine and evaluate their positions, and special guidance on how the reader can replicate this success themselves.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job in the New Economy

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of America's best companies, you need to have an answer to this and other puzzling questions. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? covers the importance of creative thinking, ways to get a leg up on the competition, what your Facebook page says about you, and much more.

The Science of Growth: How Facebook Beat Friendster - and How Nine Other Startups Left the Rest in the Dust

The lean entrepreneurship movement has captivated Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs across the country. It provided an agile framework to develop the right product solution for a given target market and is now used by almost every fledgling company to do just that. The next challenge is growth - to achieve the financial returns and, more importantly, the impact they dreamed of when starting off on their adventure.

Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business

In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history - bigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest ecommerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over 10 years, while building a customer base larger than Amazon's and handling the bulk of ecommerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know

In Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know®, New York Times best-selling author P. W. Singer and noted cyberexpert Allan Friedman team up to provide the kind of deeply informative resource book that has been missing on a crucial issue of 21st-century life. Written in a lively, accessible style, filled with engaging stories and illustrative anecdotes, the book is structured around the key question areas of cyberspace and its security: how it all works, why it all matters....

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hook Model," a four steps process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is a guide to building products people can't put down.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Young Readers Edition

"What's for dinner?" seemed like a simple question - until journalist and supermarket detective Michael Pollan delved behind the scenes. From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young readers' adaptation of Pollan's famous food-chain exploration encourages kids to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices.

Steve Jobs

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Here is the story of Jerry Weintraub: the self-made, Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer, legendary deal maker, and friend of politicians and stars. No matter where nature has placed him - the club rooms of Brooklyn, the Mafia dives of New York's Lower East Side, the wilds of Alaska, or the hills of Hollywood - he has found a way to put on a show and sell tickets at the door.

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793

In An American Plague, Jim Murphy tells the story of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Bizarre medical practices of the time are discussed, as well as popular historical figures, such as George Washington and Benjamin Rush, who were involved in finding a cure for this horrific outbreak. Pat Bottino's captivating narration adds appeal to this interesting historical tale.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business

A definitive audiobook for any CEO - first time or otherwise - of a high-growth company. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't - and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.

Investing in Real Estate, 6th Edition

Through its five previous editions, Investing in Real Estate has shown investors how to intelligently build wealth with their investments in houses, condominiums, and small apartment buildings. Unlike many titles in this genre, Investing in Real Estate steers clear of the hyped-up no cash, no credit, no problem promises. Instead, it provides sound, real-world advice and instruction that reflects the authors time-tested wisdom and experience.

Publisher's Summary

Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors' and Ford's combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room run by the Grateful Dead's former chef, and its employees traverse the firm's colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.

The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world's most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, "change the world" through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.

While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google's quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database. Listeners will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; and the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft's dominance and shake up Wall Street. Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders' mantra: DO NO EVIL.

I listed to both this book and "Search". This book has more colorful and historical stories on Google. But "Search" has better material on history, strategy, and technology. I would recommend listening to "Search" first and this one second.

I purchased this book in order to get a detailed look at the ideas and practices that made Google the success it is today. While this information is present, it is so overwhelmed by the fawning and sycophantic praise of the company and its founders that I was completely distracted.

Within the first few minutes, the author has already dubbed the company founders as geniuses, in a class by themselves, and more worthy of praise than American inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And that's just a sample.

It makes it very difficult to trust any aspect of the book as objective.

The Google Story is a great story to know and definitely worth listening to, but don't expect the best as far as writing style or narration.

The writer often switches back-and-forth between Larry and Sergey's first and last names making parts of the story a little hard to follow (as to who's doing what) until you get used to their names. The author also paints a relatively one-sided picture which is heavily Google, Larry and Sergey friendly.

Also, the narrator over-dramatizes everything which makes the story a little annoying to listen to.

I enjoyed every minute of this book from start to finish. It offers an interesting perspective into Google on both a business and personal side. I've used Google many times without ever giving any consideration into the origin of the website, how it operates or it's long range business plan. This book offers a unique insight into the personal and business sides of it's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. And provides many interesting behind the scenes details, that hold your interest throughout the entire book. This was my 4th Audible book, and was my best so far.

The authors did a competent job of presenting how Google rose to be the company it is today and where it is heading. However, there seems to be a strong bias in the way the story was told. The authors put the Google founders on a pedestal, interpreting events in such a way as to paint them as extraordinarily brillant forces of good, changing the rules of business, pervailing against vulture capitalists, greedy investment bankers and the evil Microsoft, and generally making the world a better place for mankind. Nevertheless, a good source of information for those interested in Google.

I work as a computer consultant and knew some of the google story, but these fascinating insights are truly inspirational to us computer geeks of the world. Great insights into the business behind the computer industry and how staying true to your dreams can pay off.

Very interesting book to listen to? facts I was unaware of and I closely followed this company. I would have given it a 5/5, if the author better organized the information it often repeats the same facts several times. The author gives both sides of the controversies.

I tried so hard to finish this book, but it was torture at times. It felt like I was listening to a 10 hour infomercial for Google. It had some helpful information about the founding and founders of the company, but it was so contrived that it was hard to swallow. I haven't listened to any of the other google books so I can't recommend them. But I can tell you in all honesty to avoid this one. It's a yawner.

Starts out great then as the company grows, the author reduces information and stories, but it is as expected. Okay if you like computers as I do, or want to hear of a riches to greater riches stories.

The narrator reduces what could be an interesting book into dull listen.

He has this infuriating habit of reading in a mono-tone drawl, but stretching the last word of every sentence and dropping a couple of tones. It becomes so annoying that you end up waiting for each last word drop and not listening to the text! It's almost if he took cheap correspondance course in news reading.

3 stars for the book, 1 star for the narration. Avoid.

7 of 8 people found this review helpful

Danielle

Broendby StrandDenmark

11/14/06

Overall

"Interesting insider look at Google"

Ok, I agree, the Narrator is a little irritating with a soppy voice - if you can get over it, the book gives a fascinating insiders view on how Google started, it's work ethics and future plans and goals. Very inspiring.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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